Frank Breidenbruch is an artist as we meet them in the classic period of modern arts: He philosophizes about the first and the last reasons of our existence and illustrates his thoughts, or he follows his inspirations and bases them, already during the procedure of realization, on theoretical items. For him creation and reflection go close together, he knows the meaning of what he does or wants to do, but whatever occurs unexpectedly and by coincidence is welcome and integrated without effort in his work revolving around the essential.

What is essential for Frank Breidenbruch? The human conditions and restrictions, the beyond of his means, the overcoming of his bounds, the exploration of unkonwn spheres in foreign cultures, in foreign minds. The always new but as well coherent application of forms und contents is the way and the aim of this widely talented and fastidious artist who constantly proves the transition from imagination to reality: one of his favourite words is "valid".

He has already been preoccupied by this question during his training as a stonemason, when he manufactured tombstones. What is important, what stays important in the face of the end of life? With his work as a free sculptor and his studies at the academy, in meetings und cooperations with other artists, in extraordinary projects he expanded the circle: To which dangers are we bound and how to resist them? The chance is an active being, for himself an active life for and in the arts. Beside sculpture, plastic art and drawing he discovered painting and installation, from then on all technics grow together to the complex unities of exhibitions.

He collected important ideas travelling the continents, meeting people, visiting places, listening to legends, living and working in other cultures whose traces, transformed into somethings new, influence his creation. By means of universal synthesis of form and content he invents symbols which join present, past and future.

Many works that arise from Frank Breidenbruch's talent and commitment are beautiful, they directly enjoy our perception and set up our dreaming, others are frightening, they force us to analyze what appears natural, often both aspects are inseparably connected. A few things are just made for the instance, most of them forever and again, carved in stone, casted in bronze, interpreted in line and surface on canvas and wooden boards.

Some answers have been found, a house, too, and a studio in a village near Carrara, near the marble quarries, but faraway from any rest you can meet Frank Breidenbruch wherever his quest will lead him, wherever arts take place

Kenji Takahashi

The form is unaware of adjectives, brim toward the dismissal of every meaning: yet achieved through an irritated composition of sensibility made by elements of marble that know the fracture, the imperfection the waste and the following reassembling (rather the side re-stitching). The everything, however, left in sight, almost to exhibit the used materials and the procedure put into effect; and also, busy to un-strengthen the idea of perfection, to devalue the illusion of the totality. Resonance, therefore, of the thought Zen, in the work of the Japanise Kenji Takahashi: constructions of discontinuous and open worlds framed by the void and not void framed, physiological ambitions of space, but of a space that invariably loses its place, that loses its centre: finally adventures of a subject worked by the break and by the subtraction. But the true sense of the sculpture is there, in that continuous trauma, in that broken event, in his exist-not to exist. It doesn't concern however the elaboration (all western!) of the mourning, but really of the presentation of an endless origin, of the practice of the concise language, as if the everything was inexpressible or as if could still be said always something. The same fragments that structure the sculpture are not to read him as separations, but as added; signs that deny the definition for an further (of a void) that it allows the look to penetrate and of "to create him" its height.

ROBO

ROBO was born in Milan in 1976. Careless of standards he produce paintings, murals, illustrations, posters and covers. Since 2004 he participated to the creation of artistic groups and happenings between Tuscany and Lombardy. From 2013 he is among the organizers of Carrara's "International Symposium of Hand Sculpture", which came to the fifth consecutive edition in summer 2017.

Robo exhibited in personal and collective exhibitions in Italy, Spain, Iceland and Slovenia. Scheduled for February 2018 a double personal exposition in Switzerland.

Stefanie Oberneder

Because I am the first and the last

I am admired and despised

I'm a whore and a saint

I am a wife and a virgin

I am mother and daughter

I am my mother's arms

I am sterile and the number of

my children is huge

I am the one who gives birth

and never gave light

I am wife and husband

It was my man

who created me I am my father's mother

I am the sister of my husband

and he is my abandoned son

always respect me

I am the scandalous and the magnificent

The “Horned Woman” born in my first year of academy. The first time I touched wax. "The horned” because she is horned. And because in the Italian language has another value. The value of a judgment. And horns can also be carried with pride.

I grew up in a family of uniforms. In a patriarchal world. A world in which I had to find room for myself, for my being a woman inside. This gave birth to my interest in the wild woman. The horned is such a faint, sensual, provocative being. Always alive, always on guard. Female, yes, but not too much. The taurine head is the ratio, the strength, the power. It is the uterus with its ovaries. The uterus. The centre of creation, but not just of children. For me the horned is a woman I can encounter in real life, a woman who exists. Women who live their lives in harmony with what they find around them. My work is in direct relation with what I live in our times, in our world, in our society. My direct response is this being horned. An answer that puts the woman under another light, in an important context. Has nothing to do with feminism, but with a conscious joy of being a woman.

Hemmes

Each crack or cut of this crust of the soul (opening, flapping, crouching) invents lips of burning wounds, or an eruption of lava and waves, or a wreath of flowers. Of remarkable originality is the tuning that produces the effect of the relief: sheet after sheet, cut or crumpled, each paper, plasticizing by virtue of secret detentions, is raised, bent or folded; or rather, in short, subjected to a calibrated pattern of volumes. This passage of light that pierces and exalts the transparencies, these resulting modulation of the clear colors that ring the door open, these disturbing crevasses that can be seen without foundation, are facing a sort of almost sculpture that is constantly being done to our touch and under our gaze…

Igor Mitoraj

Igor Mitoraj was a Polish artist best known for his fragmented sculptures of the human body. Often created for large-scale public installations, his monumental works referenced the struggle and suffering of 20th-century Europe. One of his most celebrated pieces, Testa Addormentata (Head Lulled to Sleep) (1983), depicts a bandaged female head on its side rendered in a Greek Classical aesthetic, and is installed on the Canary Wharf in London. “I feel that a piece of arm or a leg speak far more strongly than a whole body,” the artist said of his choice to depict only portions of the body at a time. Born on March 26, 1944 in Oederan, Germany, the artist grew up in Poland and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. His mentor, the artist Tadeusz Kantor, suggested that he study in Paris, following this advice he enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Over the following decades, the artist worked in Paris and in Pietransanta, Italy, where set up a studio and quarried the local stone for his work. Mitoraj died on October 6, 2014 in Paris, France at the age of 70. In 2016, the late artist was the subject of an exhibition held in the ruins of Pompeii which included his statues of the mythological figures Icarus and Daedalus. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Narodowe Museum in Krakow, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.

Benvenuto Saba

Born in Sardinia and educated in Tuscany, Benvenuto Saba (Cagliari, 1956) is active both as a photographer for magazines such as Domus and Abitare and as a sculptor. His works reflect an original and constant search for a balance between purely aesthetic needs and practical functionality. Foundlings - boulders returned to light from the bowels of the Apuan Alps - become elements of interior design; by polishing the purest statuary marble, he forms furnishing accessories poised between art and everyday life, in a happy compromise between sculpture and functional object. He holds a degree from the Academy of Fine Arts of Carrara and is nowadays exhibited in major Italian and international collections. Benvenuto Saba has collaborated with designers such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, Angelo Mangiarotti, Marco Ferreri, Italo Lupi, Salvatore Gregorietti, Andrea Rotti and Giacomo Bersanetti